Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry Seinfeld, just donated $5,000 (more than anyone else) to the GoFundMe of the pro-Israel UCLA rally. At this rally, participants yelled “I hope they rape you” & spat on and used the N-word towards pro-Palestinian students. pic.twitter.com/74G7QG5SVR
thedailybeast | Jessica Seinfeld, cookbook author and wife to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, is funding a pro-Israel counterprotest at UCLA—where violence broke out Tuesday night after a mob attacked demonstrators inside a pro-Palestine encampment.
A GoFundMe for the effort, which Seinfeld promoted in an Instagram story this week after contributing at least $5,000,
has since made the majority of its donations anonymous. The fundraising
page has raised more than $93,000 as of Wednesday and also changed its
organizer name and description since launching over the weekend.
The Daily Beast left messages for reps for the Seinfelds.
“I
just gave to this GoFundMe to support more allies like yesterday’s at
UCLA,” Seinfeld wrote this week. “More cities are being planned so
please give what you can. Donations are annonymous [sic]. We will continue to share our light and love, as proud American Jews.”
It’s
unclear whether Seinfeld coordinated with the GoFundMe to make
donations anonymous after they’d been public earlier in the week. Nor is
it clear whether supporters or organizers of this fundraiser were among
the 100 or so counterprotesters, some wearing masks, who ripped down
barricades or tossed objects including fireworks into the camp opposing Israel’s war on Gaza.
Still, it hasn’t stopped X users from roasting Seinfeld.
One observer, who shared video of a mob violently attacking the encampment, wrote, “Jessica Seinfeld must be elated seeing her 5k donation come to fruition.”
A University of California president parody account posted
that campus cops were “ready to step in and continue the assault once
the counterprotesters tuckered out but Jessica Seinfeld’s Zelle payments
kept their fighting spirits high into the wee hours!”
Other
celebrities—including actors Melissa Barrera and John Cusack—have
shared footage on social media of Israel supporters ambushing the UCLA
protest camp.
Billionaire hedge-funder Bill Ackman
has taken to X to repost UCLA protest footage, including one account
claiming a Jewish woman was beaten during a confrontation, and donated
$10,000 to a separate GoFundMe financing a similar video-based effort to
be held at the George Washington University.
Despite the chaos,
police and campus security didn’t intervene as the counterprotesters
moved in around 11 p.m., according to eyewitness accounts from
journalists on scene.
UCLA’s student-run newspaper, the Daily Bruin,
revealed that a counterprotester with a megaphone shouted, “If they can
be there, so can we. You guys are going to want to get this. This is
history being made.”
Biden, at today's Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony, denounces the "anti-Semitic" student protests in his strongest terms yet. He recalls there were also "anti-Semitic demonstrations" and "organized riots" in Nazi Germany. He proclaims that his defense of Israel will be "iron-clad" pic.twitter.com/NWIGqTwoEp
NYTimes | President Biden on Tuesday condemned a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel and said people were already forgetting the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance, Mr. Biden tied the anti-Jewish sentiment that led to the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews directly to Oct. 7.
“This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust,” he said. “It didn’t end with the Holocaust, either.”
For Mr. Biden, a self-described Zionist, the speech was a clear assertion of his support for Jewish Americans as he struggles to balance his support for Israel with increasingly forceful calls for the protection of civilians in Gaza.
Mr. Biden’s address also comes as protests against Israel’s war in Gaza roil college campuses, with students demanding that the Biden administration stop sending weapons to Israel. In some cases, the demonstrations have included antisemitic rhetoric and harassment targeting Jewish students.
“I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world,” the president said. But, he added, “there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”
Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the conflict. Get it sent to your inbox. Mr. Biden also denounced attempts to minimize the Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 people in Israel and sparked a war that has killed an estimated 34,000 people in Gaza.
“Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and half months later, and people are already forgetting,” Mr. Biden said. “They are already forgetting. That Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages.
“I have not forgotten, nor have you,” he told the crowd of more than 100, including Holocaust survivors. “And we will not forget.”
Since the outset of the war, Mr. Biden has faced criticism from Arab Americans and Palestinians who have said they don’t hear Mr. Biden talk about the plight of their people with the same empathy and emotion that he uses to describe Israel and the Jewish people.
Our politics reporters. Times journalists are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.
Learn more about our process. The leader of the World Food Program has said that parts of Gaza are experiencing a “full-blown famine,” in part because of Israel blocking humanitarian aid.
Jewish groups have been pressuring the administration to take firmer policy steps to combat antisemitism on college campuses, in particular. On Tuesday, the Biden administration fulfilled some of those requests.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights released new guidance to every school and college outlining examples of antisemitic discrimination, as well as other forms of hate, that could lead to investigations for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The law prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin, and the department has interpreted it as extending to Jewish students. Since the Oct. 7 attack, the department has opened more than 100 investigations into complaints about antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. The administration also announced that the Department of Homeland Security would also offer new resources, including an online campus safety resource guide.
Nathan Diament, executive director for public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, one of the groups that has been lobbying the administration for more measures for weeks, said that the Jewish community “need them implemented rapidly and aggressively.”
“President Biden’s speech today was an important statement of moral clarity at a time when too many people seem to be morally confused,” Mr. Diament said. “Just as important as the president’s words today is the announcement that his administration is taking more steps to counter the surge of antisemitism in the U.S.”
The president promised that his commitment to the security of Israel “and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad. Even when we disagree,” a reference to the arguments his administration has had with Israel’s right-wing government about the toll the war is taking in Gaza. The speech came against the backdrop of Israel’s plans to move forward with a ground operation in Rafah, which Mr. Biden opposes. More than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering in Rafah.
Mr. Biden made a tacit acknowledgment during his speech that the pro-Palestinian cause has resonated with other minority groups with histories of violence and oppression.
“We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone — anyone,” Mr. Biden said in his speech, adding that Jewish people helped lead civil rights causes throughout history.
“From that experience,” he added, “we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.”
Billionaire Zionist @sherylsandberg is confronted with a @TheGrayzoneNews takedown of the report she cites to bolster the narrative of her propaganda doc alleging mass r*pe by Hamas on Oct 7
Sandberg tacitly admits that she interviewed zero survivors, claiming without evidence… pic.twitter.com/Xa7W840QOJ
NYTimes | There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,”
the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli
women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that
the former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the
documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar, the mother
of 19-year-old Naama Levy, whose kidnapping that morning was filmed by
Hamas. The sight of her pajama bottoms, drenched in blood at the back,
was one of the earliest indications that sexual brutality was part of
Hamas’s playbook.
“They’re grabbing
her by the hair, and she’s all, like, messed up and like, and I’m
thinking of her hair, and like, in my mind I’m stroking her hair, like
I’m always doing,” Levy Sachar said of the video of her daughter’s
kidnapping. “We would like to think that this couldn’t be possible. That
nobody would harm a young girl. But then you just see it there.”
To
have a child seized, savaged and paraded this way goes beyond a
parent’s worst nightmare. Here it is compounded by an additional horror:
the combination of indifference and outright denial with which much of the world has treated these sexual atrocities.
Why?
“People are so polarized that they want every fact to fit into a
narrative, and if their narrative is resistance, then sexual violence
doesn’t fit into that narrative,” Sandberg told me when I met her in New
York last Thursday, hours before the documentary’s premiere at The
Times Center. “You can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel has
no choice; you can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel wants
to kill babies. You can hold either one of those thoughts. And you
should also be able to hold the thought that sexual violence is
unacceptable, no matter what.”
To watch “Screams
Before Silence” is to be disabused of any lingering doubts about what
Hamas did. The personal testimonies of victims, survivors and witnesses
are clear and overpowering, as is the photographic evidence Sandberg was
shown of mutilated corpses. And some of them have scarcely been heard
about outside Israel.
Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. The latest news about the conflict.
There
is Tali Binner, a partygoer at the Nova music festival who hid in a
small camper as other women were raped outside: “I heard a girl that
started to yell for a long time. It was like, ‘Please don’t. No, no,
stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. No. No. No’. It was like, she was asking someone
to stop. What can they stop? Someone is abusing her. Someone touching
her. Someone is doing something.”
There
is Raz Cohen, who witnessed a rape as he hid with a friend in the
brush: “Shoham, who was next to me, said, ‘He’s stabbing her. He’s
slaughtering her,’ or something like that, and I didn’t want to look.”
Cohen added, in Hebrew: “When I looked again, she was already dead, and
he was still at it. He was still raping her after he had slaughtered
her.”
There is Rami Davidian, who
rushed to help people at the Nova site: “I saw girls tied up with their
hands behind them to every tree here. Someone murdered them, raped them
and abused them, here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone
who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone
stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things
into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls
were murdered and raped here.”
There is Amit Soussana,
who was kidnapped to Gaza for 55 days and raped by her captor when she
was trying to bathe: “He came toward me and just pointed a gun really
hard at my forehead, screaming at me, ‘Take it off. Take it off,’ and
punching me until I could not hold the towel anymore. And he started
touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom. And
then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him.”
americanconservative | ong after the current administration passes from
the scene, President Joseph R. Biden and Secretary of State Antony
Blinken will be remembered not for their bumbling, embarrassing encounters with the Chinese, nor for their steadfast refusal
to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Russians, which set off a
disastrous war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Instead, they will likely be remembered as the abettors of Israel’s
transformation of Gaza into an abattoir, and will leave a legacy as bloodstained as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s.
But, to be fair, Nixon and Kissinger knew which country was theirs;
they understood that the United States and Israel have distinct and vastly different interests. Indeed, it is little remembered today that as Secretary of State, Kissinger once ordered a reassessment of this so-called “special relationship.”
Lacking the sheen of Kissinger’s not inconsiderable wit and
intellect, Tony Blinken, a protege of Marty Peretz, erstwhile publisher
of the New Republic and an ideological Zionist, may one day be remembered as his generation’s Robert McNamara: a bland bureaucrat carrying out the obscene orders of his commander-in-chief.
As if more were needed to bolster such a judgment, this week, after
acknowledging that five Israeli military units had engaged in gross
human rights abuses, the Biden administration signaled it will not apply
the Leahy Law—which
prohibits aid to militaries that have committed human rights abuses—to
Israel. It would be hard to improve upon the following headline from the
Hill: “US finds Israeli military units violated human rights; withholds consequences.”
In an incredible performance this Monday at Foggy Bottom, the State Department spokesman Vedant Patel (yet anotherforeign-born bureaucrat who clearly knows little about the country he is paid to represent) ran cover for the Israelis once again, claiming that the IDF was now in line with Leahy and all is well.
Yet, given Israel’s widespread, heavily documented crimes, including the deployment of AI systems such as Lavender AIsystematically
to terrorize the Palestinian population, the application of Leahy would
seem a mere slap on the wrist. Yet Blinken and Biden have deemed even
symbolic measures of disapproval of Israel’s rampage as too great a
burden on Tel Aviv.
If Blinken and Biden were serious about stopping the carnage, they
could have applied section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which
prohibits security assistance to countries blocking humanitarian aid. In
late March, a group of Democratic senators and congressmen called on the administration to do just that, writing, in a letter to the President,
Federal law is clear, and, given the urgency of the crisis in Gaza,
and the repeated refusal of Prime Minister Netanyahu to address U.S.
concerns on this issue, immediate action is necessary to secure a change
in policy by his government.
If Biden and Blinken were serious, they would have applied Leahy and enforced the terms of the Arms Control Export Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Genocide Convention Implementation Act;
if they were serious, they would have supported South Africa’s case
against Israel in the International Court of Justice; if they were
serious, they would not have instructed UN Ambassador Linda
Thomas-Greenfield repeatedly to veto
measures in the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire; if they
were serious, they would call for the International Criminal Court to
issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and others.
AP | The House passed legislation Wednesday that would establish a broader
definition of antisemitism for the Department of Education to enforce
anti-discrimination laws, the latest response from lawmakers to a
nationwide student protest movement over the Israel-Hamas war.
The proposal, which passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support, would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism
in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal
anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on shared
ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. It now goes to the
Senate where its fate is uncertain.
Action on the bill was just
the latest reverberation in Congress from the protest movement that has
swept university campuses. Republicans in Congress have denounced the
protests and demanded action to stop them, thrusting university
officials into the center of the charged political debate over Israel’s
conduct of the war in Gaza. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been
killed since the war was launched in October, after Hamas staged a
deadly terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would broaden
the legal definition of antisemitism to include the “targeting of the
state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” Critics say the
move would have a chilling effect on free speech throughout college
campuses.
“Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful
discrimination,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said during a hearing
Tuesday. “By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into
Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”
Advocates of the proposal say it would provide a much-needed,
consistent framework for the Department of Education to police and
investigate the rising cases of discrimination and harassment targeted
toward Jewish students.
“It is long past time that Congress act to protect Jewish Americans
from the scourge of antisemitism on campuses around the country,” Rep.
Russell Fry, R-S.C., said Tuesday.
The expanded definition of
antisemitism was first adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust
Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group that includes the
United States and European Union states, and has been embraced by the
State Department under the past three presidential administrations,
including Joe Biden’s
Previous bipartisan efforts to codify it
into law have failed. But the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas militants
in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have reignited efforts to
target incidents of antisemitism on college campuses.
Just
before midnight, a large group of counterdemonstrators, wearing black
outfits and white masks, arrived on campus and tried to tear down the
barricades surrounding the encampment. Campers, some holding lumber and
wearing goggles and helmets, rallied to defend the encampment’s
perimeter. The violence occurred hours after the university declared
that the camp was “unlawful and violates university policy.”
Videos
showed fireworks being set off and at least one being thrown into the
camp. Over several hours, counterdemonstrators threw objects, including
wood and a metal barrier, at the camp and those inside, with fights
repeatedly breaking out. Some tried to force their way into the camp,
and the pro-Palestinian side used pepper spray to defend themselves.
A
group of security guards could be seen observing the clashes but did
not move in to stop them. Authorities cleared the area around 3 a.m.
Some
in the camp were being treated for eye irritation and other wounds. The
extent of the injuries was unclear, though The Times saw several people
who were bleeding and needed medical attention. At least one person, a
26-year-old man suffering from a head injury, was taken to the hospital
by paramedics, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
UCLA
administrators and law enforcement are facing scrutiny from students,
professors and the broader community for not intervening faster.
“The
limited and delayed campus law enforcement response at UCLA last night
was unacceptable — and it demands answers,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office
said in a statement.
UCLA officials decried the violence and said
they had requested help from the Los Angeles Police Department. It is
not clear whether police made any arrests. UCLA police did not
immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
“Horrific
acts of violence occurred at the encampment tonight and we immediately
called law enforcement for mutual aid support. The fire department and
medical personnel are on the scene. We are sickened by this senseless
violence and it must end,” Mary Osako, vice chancellor for UCLA
Strategic Communications, said in a statement.
A law enforcement
source told The Times on Wednesday that the LAPD reached out to campus
police shortly after the violence broke out. They were told not to bring
in anti-riot police, but eventually UCLA agreed to accept help from the
larger police force. The discussion unfolded over several hours until
officers with the LAPD and California Highway Patrol were given the
green light to intervene around 1 a.m., the source said.
At
around 1:40 a.m., police officers in riot gear arrived, and some
counterprotesters began to leave. But the police did not immediately
break up the clashes at the camp, which continued despite the law
enforcement presence.
One representative of the camp said the
counterdemonstrators repeatedly pushed over barricades that outline the
boundaries of the encampment, and some campers said they were hit by a
substance they thought was pepper spray. As counterprotesters attempted
to pull down the wood boards surrounding the encampment, at least one
person could be heard yelling, “Second nakba,” referring to the mass
displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948
Arab-Israeli war.
Daily Bruin News Editor Catherine Hamilton said
she was sprayed with some type of irritant and repeatedly punched in
the chest and upper abdomen as she was reporting on the unrest. Another
student journalist was pushed to the ground by counterprotesters and was
beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. Hamilton was treated at a
hospital and released.
“I truly did not expect to be directly
assaulted. I know that these individuals — at least the individual who
initiated the mobilization against us — knew that we were journalists,”
she said. “And while I did not think that protected us from harassment, I
thought that might have [prevented us from being] assaulted. I was
mistaken.”
At around 3 a.m., a line of officers arrived at the
camp and pushed the remaining counterprotesters out of the quad area.
The police told people to leave or face arrest.
“What we’ve just
witnessed was the darkest day in my 32 years at UCLA,” said David Myers,
a professor of Jewish history at UCLA who is working on initiatives to
bridge differences on campus. He called the situation a “complete and
total systems failure at the university, city and state levels.”
“Why
didn’t the police, UCPD and LAPD, show up? Those in the encampment were
defenseless in the face of a violent band of thugs. And no one,
wherever they stand politically, is safer today,” Myers said.
Ananya
Roy, a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography,
echoed concerns about the university’s lack of response when faced with a
violent counterprotest.
“It gives people impunity to come to our
campus as a rampaging mob,” she said. “The word is out they can do this
repeatedly and get away with it. I am ashamed of my university.”
nakedcapitalism | Many US papers are giving front-page, above the fold treatment to
university administrators going wild and calling in the cops on peaceful
campus protests, first at Columbia, followed by Yale and NYU.
Harvard, in a profile in courage, closed its campus to prevent a
spectacle. Demonstrations are taking hold at other campuses, including
MIT, Emerson, and Tufts.
This is an overly dynamic situation, so I am not sure it makes sense
to engage in detailed coverage. However, some things seem noteworthy.
First, in typical US hothouse fashion, the press is treating protests
as if they were a bigger deal than the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I am
not the only one to notice this. From Parapraxis (hat tip guurst; bear with the author’s leisurely set-up):
I am employed as a non-tenure-track professor
in a university department dedicated to teaching and research about
Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. One day, I arrived at work to find
security cameras installed in my department’s hallway. I read in an
email that these cameras had been installed after an antisemitic poster
was discovered affixed to a colleague’s office door. I was never shown
this poster. Like the cameras, I learned of it only belatedly. Despite
the fact that the poster apparently constituted so great a danger to the
members of my department as to warrant increased security, nobody
bothered to inform me about it. By the time I was aware that there was a
threat in which I was ostensibly implicated, the decision had already
been made—by whom, exactly, I don’t know—about which measures were
necessary to protect me from it. My knowledge, consent, and perspective
were irrelevant to the process…
The prolepsis of the decision did more than protect me—if, indeed, it
really did that. It interpellated my coworkers and myself as people in
need of protection…. I was unwittingly transformed, literally overnight,
into the type of person to whom something might happen.
My employer has a campus—three, actually—meaning that it has a
physical plant. I navigate one of these campuses as my workplace, but it
almost never figures for me as “the campus.” In fact, the
first time since beginning the job when I felt myself caught up in an
affective relation, not to the particular institution where I work, but
rather to “the campus” was when I looked up into that security
camera and felt myself being “watched” by it. Only then did I think, a
couple of months into my temporary contract, that I was not just at my
workplace. Now I was on “the campus.”
This incident with the poster and the camera occurred, of course,
some weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza. Against so horrific a
backdrop, and relative to the intimidation and retaliation to which
those who speak out against the war (including—indeed, especially—in the
academy) have been subjected, my story sounds banal. And it is. In its
very ordinariness, however, the anecdote is quite representative: first,
of how decisions get made at contemporary institutions of higher
education (generally speaking, without the input of those whom they
impact); and second, of the logic of a peculiarly American phenomenon I
call campus panic….
The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus
panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus
is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is
happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is
happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed
by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems
likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus
panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War.
Second, many otherwise fine stories, like Columbia in crisis, again
by the Columbia Journalism Review, and Columbia University protests and
the lessons of “Gym Crow” by Judd at Popular Information, start off
with the 1968 protests at Columbia as a point of departure. And again,
consistent with the Parapraxis account and being old enough to remember
the Vietnam War, I find the comparison to be overdone. Yes, there are
some telling similarities, like the role of right-wing pressure in
getting campus administrators to call out the cops, the device of
dwelling on the earlier uprising seems to obscure more than it reveals.
The Vietnam War, unlike Gaza, tore the US apart. Today’s campus students
are, with only the comparatively small contingent of Palestinian
students, acting to protest US support of slaughter in Gaza. In 1968,
for many, the stake were more personal. The risk of young men having to
serve was real.
Similarly, conservatives then supported the military and were
typically proud of their or any family member’s service. Draft dodging
and demonization of armed forces leaders was close to unconscionable. It
took years of the major television networks and the two authoritative
magazines, Time and Newsweek, showing what the war looked like, and
intimating that the US was not succeeding, that shifted mass opinion.
davidstockman | What Johnson’s impending Waterloo means, therefore, is not merely the
prospect of another wild and wooly succession battle, but actually that there is no point at all in the preservation of a Republican majority and GOP House Speaker. After all, the Washington GOP has become so infected with neocon warmongers and careerist pols
who spend a lifetime basking in the imperial projects and pretensions
of the world’s War Capital that apparently the best the House GOP caucus
could do when it ejected the previous careerist deep stater from the
Speaker’s chair was to tap the dim-witted nincompoop who currently
occupies it.
The Republican party is thus truly beyond redemption. As JFK once said about the CIA, its needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces and swept into the dustbin of history.
Indeed, when you look at the calamitous fiscal trajectory embedded in the CBO’s latest 30-year fiscal outlook, you truly have to wonder about what miniature minds like Congressman Johnson’s are actually thinking. That
is to say, the latest CBO report published in March presumes that there
will never be another recession and no inflation flare-up, interest
rate spike, global energy dislocation, prolonged Forever War or any
other imaginable crisis ever again—just smooth economic sailing for the
next 30 years.
And yet, and then. Even by the math of this Rosy Scenario on steroids the public debt will reach $140 trillion
at minimum by 2054. In turn, that would cause interest payments on the
public debt with rates no higher than those which prevailed between 1986
and 1997 to reach $10 trillion per year.
You
simply don’t need paragraphs, pages and whole monographs worth of
analysis and amplification to understand where that is going. The
nation’s fisc is now on the cusp of descending into the maws of a
doomsday machine. So how in the world do these elements of Johnson’s
offering make even the remotest sense?
Speaker Johnson's Foreign Aid Boondoggle:
Indo-Pacific aid: $8.1 billion.
Israel: $26.4 billion.
Ukraine: $60.8 billion.
Total: $95.3 billion.
Apparently,
it’s because Johnson and a good share of the Washington GOP have
succumbed wholesale to neocon paranoia, stupidity, lies and hollow
excuses for warmongering. For crying out loud, Putin has no interest in molesting the Poles, to say nothing of storming the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
He is certainly no Ghandi, but well more than smart enough to recognize
that with Russia’s GDP of $2.2 trillion and war budget of $80 billion
there would be no point in going to war with NATO’s $45 trillion of GDP
and combined war budgets in excess of $1.2 trillion.
Likewise,
China’s $50 trillion debt-ridden Ponzi would collapse in months if its
$3.5 trillion flow of export earnings were disrupted after attempting to
land its single modern aircraft carrier on the California coast. And
Iran has no nukes, no intercontinental range missiles and a GDP equal to
130 hours of US annual output.
So, some Axis of evil!
Yet
that’s exactly what the Speaker said this morning after going to too
many Deep State briefings and apparently having his own johnson yanked
once too often. The Swamp creatures surely see the lad’s naivete and
blithering ignorance as a gift that doesn’t stop giving. That is to say,
a “mark” who knows nothing at all about the world from sources not
stamped, “Top Secret (lies)”.
Speaker Mike Johnson: “We’re
going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn’t march
through Europe… we’re the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to
act like it”,
This is a critical time right now, a
critical time on the world stage. I can make a selfish decision and do
something that’s different but I’m doing here what I believe to be the
right thing. “I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is
critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we've gotten.
I believe Xi, Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil.
I think they’re in coordination on it. “So I think that Vladimir Putin
would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he
might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.
To
put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American
boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a
live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is
not a game, this is not a joke.
Needless to say, our dufus Speaker doesn’t know the “Baltics” from the “Balkans” where Serbia and other Russian friendlies are definitely not quaking in their boots about Putin.
In
point of fact, however, it is not hard to see that the civil war and
territorial dispute between Kiev and Moscow over the Donbas and rim of
the Black Sea from Mariupol to Odessa is a one-off of Russian and
regional history and Washington’s mindless push of NATO eastward to
Russia’s very doorstep.
The light-yellow area of this 1897 map
gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there
was no doubt as to the paternity of the Donbas and the lands adjacent to
the Azov Sea and the Black Sea. Already then, they were part of the 125
years-old New Russia, which had been assembled by purchase and conquest
during the reign of Catherine the Great.
Indeed, it was only in
1922 that the yellow area—essentially demarcating the four provinces of
Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which recently voted to
rejoin Russia—was appended to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by
the great humanitarian and map-maker, V. Lenin.
And yet
Speaker Johnson now wants to crash the Republican Party on enforcing a
map drawn by one of history’s bloodiest monsters. It’s come down to that.
US officials are touting Israel’s defense of Iran’s attack as a
victory, and that’s the message Biden conveyed to Netanyahu, a sign the
US doesn’t want the situation to escalate. Iran fired over 300 missiles
and drones at Israel, which was a response to Israel’s bombing of Iran’s
consulate in Damascus on April 1.
“Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange. It took out the
IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp] leadership in the Levant, Iran
tried to respond, and Israel clearly demonstrated its military
superiority, defeating this attack, particularly in coordination with
its partners,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters, according to The Times of Israel.
In a statement on the attack released by the White House, Biden said he would convene with other G7 leaders to “coordinate a united diplomatic response to Iran’s brazen attack.”
Israeli officials claimed 99% of the Iranian missiles and drones were
intercepted by Israeli air defense systems and with assistance from the
US, Britain, and Jordan. Some missiles got through and damaged the
Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel. Only one person was injured in the
attack, a seven-year-old Bedouin girl in the Negev, and nobody was
killed.
Iran gave Israel plenty of time to respond to the attack by
announcing it fired the drones hours before they reached Israeli
territory, and Tehran said it gave other regional countries a 72-hour notice. Iranian officials said the attack was “limited” and made clear they do not seek an escalation with Israel.
But Tehran is also warning it will launch an even bigger attack if
Israel responds. “If the Zionist regime or its supporters demonstrate
reckless behavior, they will receive a decisive and much stronger
response,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said in a statement on Sunday.
While the US is signaling it seeks de-escalation and won’t support a
potential Israeli attack on Iran, it’s unclear what Israel will do next.
The Israeli war cabinet convened to discuss the situation on Sunday, and Israeli media reports said they agreed a response would come but didn’t decide on where or when.
Israeli War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz vowed Israel would respond
but signaled it wouldn’t be imminent. Gantz said the “event is not
over” and that Israel should “build a regional coalition and exact a
price from Iran, in a way and at a time that suits us.”
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Biden also told Netanyahu
“that the United States is going to continue to help Israel defend
itself,” signaling the US would intervene again to help Israel if it
does choose to escalate the situation and comes under another attack.
Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria killed 13 people,
including seven members of the IRGC. Israel has a history of conducting
covert attacks inside Iran and killing Iranians in Syria, but the
bombing of the diplomatic facility marked a huge escalation.
nakedcapitalism | I recently came across this piece
from the Century Foundation titled “A Bolder American Foreign Policy
Means More Values and Less War.” Its central argument is that the US
must “recenter values” like “multilateralism and human rights that are
core to its identity.”
The Century Foundation calls itself a “a progressive, independent
think tank,” and this particular piece appears to mean well but is just
as disconnected from reality than all the neocon think tanks’ war
mongering policy papers saying Washington will prevail as it takes on
Russia, China, Iran, and whoever else it feels like.
The Century Foundation authors possess a Hollywoodized idea of
America that isn’t a land filled with brutal class struggle but virtue,
which flow out into its foreign policy that stands for international
humanitarian or human rights law. I think anyone with a basic
understanding of current events or recent history knows how ridiculous
this is, and yet it is repeated ad nauseam by every purported think
tank. I suppose this is a classic example of Upton Sinclair’s saying
that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salary depends on his not understanding it,” but I think the Century
Foundation is onto something with its focus on values. It’s just that it
has it backwards. The problem is that values are what has the US on
the brink of starting World War III in multiple locations.
So what are the core values that do have it such a position – and whose are they?
I think the story of former US President Herbert Hoover is
instructive. He had interests in mines in Russia until they were seized
by the Bolsheviks. [1] Hoover never forgot about it and remained terrified of Communists for the rest of his life – and for good reason considering how much he stood to lose.
Though Hoover got booted out of office in 1932, he played a central
role in organizing capitalists to counter worker organization both in
the US and abroad. His legacy lives on at Stanford’s neocon Hoover
Institution. Throughout his life, he remained a major admirer of
pre-Soviet Russia: “At the top was a Russian noble family and at the
bottom 100,000 peasants and workers with nobody much in between but the
priesthood and the overseers.”
That pretty much sums up the capitalist class’ enduring vision not
just for Russia, but everywhere. Ownership of Russian mines or Opium
Wars in China might not factor much into my or your everyday life, but
you can bet it’s an important part of American ruling class ideology.
Whose values? The dominant value at play there is a belief that as
Western capitalists they have a right and a duty to exploit and profit
off of every corner of the globe. Just like capital must dominate labor,
it must expand and find new sources of revenue. If governments in
Russia and China impede that progress, they must be destroyed.
Rather than bromides like more American “values,” the following are
some questions or thought exercises for think tanks to consider –
whether they want to win another war or maybe even quit starting so many
of them.
Can You Practice Realpolitik with Gangsters?
The US is a market state that is dominated by and run for
transnational capital. Its foreign policy and the military are a tool of
the American oligarchy. Therefore, any serious policy discussion needs
to deal with the fact that national interests as they’re expressed today
are not in any real sense national but representative of the interests
of a small cohort of the super wealthy.
When US officials go on about spreading “freedom,” they’re not lying.
It’s just their idea of freedom is a state devoted to high profits – free from the political whims of local populations that could degrade an investment’s expected return.
Let’s remember there likely wouldn’t be any problem with Russia had
Putin not put an end to the 1990s shock therapy administered by the
Western finance capitalists who were making a killing by pillaging
Russian resources. Like Bert Hoover, they’re haunted by that opportunity
snatched away from them, and they’ve been trying to get it back for a
quarter century now.
The question is will American capital ever voluntarily give up? Will
it ever say “okay, we’re satisfied with what we’ve got here, you do your
thing in your sphere of influence”?
It’s not like Moscow and Beijing haven’t tried. Russia for example
floated the idea of joining NATO or working out some other security
arrangement. For decades after the end of the USSR, Russia tried to be
accepted into the West’s club to no avail.
China, too, constantly repeats the refrain that the world is big enough for both Beijing and Washington. It invited the US to join it in its Belt and Road Initiative.
The US could have helped steer projects that would have benefited both
countries. While such cooperation between the two big powers wouldn’t be
a panacea for all the world’s problems, it would likely mean a lot
better spot than current one. Instead the US wanted the whole pie and
instead we got the TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy
balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on
China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous
effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan
and/or the South China Sea.
There is a lot of confusion over why the West keeps escalating in a
losing effort. Why, for example, are Western governments going around
begging for shells to send Ukraine rather than accepting the L? The
desperation seems to stem from the creeping realization that their
system is coming undone. The entire post-WWII elite American mindset is
built on the foundation of worldwide profit expansion via silicon and
fire, and if they throw everything at Russia and lose, well a whole new
domino theory could come into play – one where parasitic Western finance
capital is driven back. (Granted it might in most cases be replaced by a
more local form, but it’s nonetheless frightening for the Western
honchos.) Just look at what’s happening to France in Françafrique! And
the US in the Middle East!
The fact that the West can no longer even manufacture enough weapons
to supply its proxy wars almost certainly means that the dominoes will
keep falling.
Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks are, like, way better than Warren Buffett's. How does that happen?"
sputnik | Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) raised eyebrows
recently with the revelation the former US House Speaker placed a big
bet on a little-known San Francisco tech startup. A disclosure made last
week showed the powerful Democratic Party politician purchased $5
million in stock of the privately-held company Databricks, a cloud data
company. The stake is one of dozens Pelosi holds in US tech companies,
some obscure and some well-known such as Tesla and Microsoft. The
lawmaker has reportedly invested more than $120 million in stock
purchases since entering federal government in 1987. Her net worth is
thought to be over $100 million, although her current salary as a US
congresswoman is just over $220,000. Pelosi has never been convicted of
criminal wrongdoing in her investment activity, although her portfolio’s
impressive return of 65% last year might suggest the legislator is more
informed than average traders. US stock indices grew an average of 26%
in 2023.
“From an ethical perspective, I believe it is extremely harmful for
politicians to trade individual stocks,” said Chris Josephs, the founder
of a stock trading service, to US media. “There are numerous jobs out
there that don’t allow employees [to conduct] trading, yet our most
powerful Americans can.” Pelosi opposed attempts to ban lawmakers from
buying and selling stocks in 2021 under the claim such activity could be
viewed as insider trading. “We are a free-market economy,” she said at
the time. “They [Congress members] should be able to participate in
that.” Former director of the US Office of Government Ethics Walter
Shaub slammed the argument as “ridiculous.” “She might as well have said
‘let them eat cake,’” said Shaub, referring to famous comments by the
French queen Marie Antoinette. “Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But
your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government
experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the
price of stocks.”
Late last week it was announced that an activist involved in
pro-Palestine protests at the California lawmaker’s home had been
arrested on felony vandalism charges. Cynthia Papermaster, 77, is
reportedly being held on a $50,000 bond. “We want to see a permanent and
immediate ceasefire,” said Papermaster in an interview recently. “We
can’t control what the Israelis do, but we can control what our own
government does, or at least that’s the aspiration.” Pelosi called for
the anti-war activists to be investigated by the FBI in an appearance on
US television after the incident earlier this year. Pelosi first
claimed the demonstrators were being paid by China, then later clarified
she believed Russia was behind the act of civil disobedience. The
former House speaker joins the ranks of opponents of US civil rights
with her comments; detractors frequently claimed racial justice protests
in the 1960s and 70s were fomented by Russia to sow discord in the
United States.
strategic culture | Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to
the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources
in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of
investigation.
December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA
mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to
sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the
middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign
behind the lines.”
January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets
Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an
empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for
asymmetric war.
February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty
surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive
signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.
February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.
Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been
in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter
alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State
factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or
another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the
dots.
Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in
Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to
be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).
Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in
place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.
March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.
March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.
March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies
simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling
their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two
days.
March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman
performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion
targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before
the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus
was massive, so the op is postponed.
March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.
ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms
The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to
previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir
Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a
dash for the border.
And that brings us to the Tajik connection.
There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the
ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on
Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand
rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a
concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a
weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.
The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were
accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective
use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away,
almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the
border to Ukraine.
All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty
counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all –
quite literally.
A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish
intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat
Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told
the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the
op.
And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.
The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah
Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the
Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in
Pakistan.
Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen
Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad
al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the
government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a
crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those
classic inter-jihadi squabbles.
Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent
attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another
vector of the “nasty surprises”.
Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired
citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty
motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens
worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually
indistinguishable from ISIS.
Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the
classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by
the CIA and the Pentagon.
Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed
ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by
Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.
The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon
Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando.
Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.
The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never
features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom.
Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the
500 thousand ruble reward.
After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat
– the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have
been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not
identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then
Afghanistan.
That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have
been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the
client.
The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs
Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror
galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s.
Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the
past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.
Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with
assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these
connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus
outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR
routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat
rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.
One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of
the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine,
Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.
The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by
pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by
ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under
the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.
The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi
of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile;
adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides
him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor
become disposable.
Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the
Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware
of what he was carrying,
As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a
gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring
ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then
to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project
ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS
goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the
Taliban.
Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).
The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking
most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established,
there will be hell to pay.
But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are
not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western
intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with
Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.
The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists
from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in
terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will
be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of
managing these networks.
But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems
to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial
middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.
Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators”
chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority –
Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a
multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for
centuries.
In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the
Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment –
whatever and wherever it takes.
TAE | From what I’ve read so far, ISIS is about the least likely suspect
for the Crocus massacre. If only because the CIA fingered them within
minutes of the event. Russia will need to do a very thorough
investigation, and hard evidence, to keep its people calm. Andrew
Korybko has more:
Andrew Korybko:
Speculation has swirled since Friday night’s terroristattack
at the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow over whether ISIS-K was really
responsible like the group claimed or if Ukraine’s military-intelligence
service GUR orchestrated everything under the cover of its agents
posing as members of that group. The Mainstream Media is running with
the first scenario while doing their utmost to discredit the second, but
recalling the GUR’s terrorist history and ties with radical Islamists
shows that it’s not above suspicion.
For as lethal as the GUR has become over the past decade, it’s still a
CIA knockoff, which is why it’s expected to make sloppy mistakes from
time to time. This is relevant when it comes to the latest attack after
ISIS-K claimed responsibility using an outdated news template,
thus suggesting that someone else claimed credit in their name at first
but then ISIS-K opportunistically ran with it for clout. Considering
its terrorist history and ties with radical Islamists, that mysterious
actor was arguably the GUR.
What likely happened is that their agents posed as members of that
terrorist group in order to retain plausible deniability in case the
planned attack was foiled or the terrorists were caught afterwards. One
of the Tajiks who was captured in the car that was racing towards the
Ukrainian border claimed
that they were recruited by the curators of a radical Telegram channel
just a month ago to carry out the attack using already cached arms in
exchange for a debit card payment of around $5000 each.
These nationals were probably chosen by the GUR since some of them
are predisposed to religious radicalism due to the lingering legacy of
Tajikistan’s Islamist-inspired civil war from the 1990s, their country
abuts ISIS-K’s Afghan headquarters, and they have visa-free travel privileges to Russia.
Accordingly, they were allegedly recruited via a radical Telegram
channel, ISIS-K’s involvement doesn’t seem entirely implausible, and
they were able to easily enter Russia with minimal scrutiny.
They weren’t radical enough to go out with guns blazing or in a
suicide blast like ISIS-K is known for, however, but were still
sufficiently sympathetic with that group’s ideology to carry out what
they believed was its latest mission in exchange for money. This
explains why they fled from the scene of the crime, which is contrary to
what any affiliate of that group would ever do, after machine-gunning
dozens of people and setting fire to the venue.
Had they reached Ukraine, where the FSB confirmed that they had contacts and President Putin said
that “a window was prepared for them…to cross over”, then they’d likely
have been killed by the GUR to cover everything up. It shouldn’t be
forgotten that this group learned how to conduct terrorism from the CIA,
which in turn perfected this practice in Syria over the past 13 years
of the Hybrid War that it’s been waging there, but the GUR is still a
knockoff and that’s why they made three sloppy mistakes.
In the order that they occurred, their first mistake was recruiting
people who weren’t ready to fight to the death at the scene of their
forthcoming terrorist attack. This led to the culprits being captured
and spilling the beans about how they were recruited in exchange for
money, which is one of the signs that ISIS-K wasn’t behind what happened
since their members always expect to die as “martyrs”. Accordingly, the
fact that this mistake was made suggests that the GUR was desperate to
go through with their plans.
The second mistake was that they didn’t tell their proxies to flee to
a safe house right after the attack to meet a contact that’ll then help
them reach the border later on but who’d actually kill them once they
meet in order to cover everything up. This led to them racing towards
the Ukrainian border, thus showing everyone that they at the very least
felt that they’d find sanctuary there, which made Russia’s claim of
Ukrainian involvement much more believable for many skeptical
Westerners.
And finally, the last mistake was that the GUR used an outdated news
template to claim credit for the attack on behalf of ISIS-K, who they
correctly predicted would opportunistically run with it for clout. By
doing so, however, they signaled that the group itself didn’t play a
role in organizing what happened otherwise their more modern template
would have been used instead. Taken together, these three sloppy
mistakes discredited the Mainstream Media’s narrative and drew attention
to the GUR instead.
Coupled with its terrorist history and ties with radical Islamic
groups, which respectively prove that it has the capabilities and intent
to carry out the Crocus attack as well as the knowledge required to
impersonate extremists online for recruiting purposes, all of this makes
the GUR the prime suspect. It learned everything about terrorism from
the CIA, but since it’s still a knockoff, it made a series of sloppy
mistakes that resulted in incriminating Ukraine instead of lending false
credence to the ISIS-K narrative.
strategic culture |Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has
a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it,
not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way
or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail
and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers
leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes,
this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a
music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots
people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on
fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing,
all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in
southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least
five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in
Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is
among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan
next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they
have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring
China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb,
Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total
political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no
one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of
course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers.
A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday
during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a
mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it
with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this
ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an
all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real
Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in:
ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably
Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian
SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the
commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He
directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and
British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places
in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible
terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the
Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...